The present invention relates to an extremely small electronic timepiece which can be utilized as a decorative accessory, such as a pendant or ring, and which provides a high degree of display visibility and ease of time correction, in spite of the small size of the timepiece.
There is at present a requirement for digital electronic timepieces of very small size, which can be incorporated into dress accessories such as pendants or rings. With a conventional type of digital electronic timepiece, various different categories of time information, such as hours, minutes, and in some cases seconds, or year, month, date, etc, are simultaneously displayed upon the timepiece face. Such an arrangement is satisfactory for an electronic timepiece of normal size. However, in the case of a highly miniaturized digital electronic timepiece, for use in a pendant or ring for example, the display area of the timepiece must be made much smaller than that of a conventional electronic timepiece. Thus, if it is attempted to show different categories of time information simultaneously on the timepiece display, for example the two digits indicating the minutes and the one or two digits indicating hours information, then the size of the display digits will become so small as to be very difficult for the user to read. It is possible to approach this problem by a method such as displaying only the minutes digits or hours digits at any one time, so that the user has to actuate a switch to change over to display of the information not being currently displayed. However such methods are highly inconvenient.
With a digital electronic timepiece according to the present invention, these problems are effectively solved, by providing a continuously laterally shifting display (referred to hereinafter simply as "display shifting"), whereby for example the digits indicating the hours of time information move across the timepiece display, followed by the digits indicating the minutes information, which disappear to be followed by the digits of hours information, and so on. With such a method, the size of the display digits can be made sufficiently large to ensure ease of reading the display, even if the electronic timepiece is made very small in size. In addition, as described hereinafter, correction of time information can be very simply and rapidly accomplished with a digital electronic timepiece according to the present invention, in spite of the small size of the timepiece, and even if only a single externally operated correction switch is incorporated. Thus, the present invention makes possible the manufacture of digital electronic timepieces of very small size which are at the same time highly practicable and can be produced at relatively low cost, due to the overall simplicity of the timepiece configuration.